Frantz Fanon
Frantz Fanon 1925-1961 Brief Biography Frantz Fanon was born in 1925, on the island of Martinique, of the French Antilles. Fanon was born to a middle-class black family and grew up among the descendants of African slaves that had worked the island's sugar plantations. In 1943, after Free French forces regained control of Martinique from the pro-Nazi French Vichy government, Fanon volunteered to fight in Europe. After the end of World War II, Fanon, a now highly decorated war hero, decided to remain in France and pursue and education in psychiatry. His first book, Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks), published in 1952, was heavily influenced by his experiences in France, where he found that despite his many accomplishments he was always being disregarded based on the color of his skin (Simon 1437). In 1953, after having completed his medical training, Fanon was appointed head of the psychiatric department of the Blida-Joinville Hospital in Algeria. One year later, the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) began their revolt that would ultimately result in Algeria's independence from France eight years later, in 1962. Sympathetic to the Algerian cause, Fanon resigned his medical position and instead became the editor of the FLN newspaper. Fanon died five years later from leukemia, at the age of thirty-six (Simon 1438). “The Wretched of the Earth: From on National Culture” Background/Historical Context Key Words * Nationalism - An ideology that holds up the significance of a geographical and sometimes demographic region (a nation) seeking independence for its culture or ethnicity that holds that group together * oral tradition - Stories, epics, and songs of the people. * a posteriori - relating to what can be known by observation rather than through an understanding of how certain things work (“A Posteriori”). * Sartrean existentialism (NATC 1439) - A Humanism, to be human is characterised by an existence that precedes its essence. As such, existence is problematic, and it is towards the development of a full existentialist theory of what it is to be human that Sartre's work logically evolves (“Jean Paul Sartre: Existentialism”). Key Quotes * “The storytellers . . .There is a tendency to bring conflicts up to date and to modernize the kinds of struggles which the stories evoke, together with the names of heroes and the types of weapons. The method of allusions is more and more widely used. The formula “This all happened long ago” is substituted with that of “What we are going to speak of happened somewhere else, but it might well have happened here today, and it might happen tomorrow” (NATC ''1442). * “The nation is not only the condition of culture, its fruitlessness, its continuous renewal, and its deepening. It is also a necessity. It is the fight for national existence which sets culture moving and opens to it the doors of creation” (1444). * “National consciousness, which is not, nationalism, is the only thing that will give us an international dimension. This problem of national consciousness and of national culture takes on in Africa a special dimension. The birth of national consciousness in Africa has strictly contemporaneous connection with the African consciousness” (1446). * "Every effort is made to bring the colonized person to admit the inferiority of his culture which has been transformed into instinctive patterns of behavior, to recognize the unreality of his 'nation,' and, in the last extreme. the confused and imperfect character of his own biological structure" (1440) '''Analysis/Interpretation' Fanon's thinking as a Marxist is evident throughout The Wretched of the Earth ''as he explains that in order for African nations to succeed after colonialism they cannot merely replace the ruling class with its own black African leaders. It is explained that culture itself must also evolve in a postcolonial African nation because "culture is not put into cold storage during the conflict" (''NACT ''1445). Fanon is noting that the culture of a colonially oppressed nation is influenced by the oppressors and the culture itself cannot be saved and then taken out to function and exist as it did before colonialism. There must be the rectification of nationalism so that a nation's culture is able to recover and evolve from something that is oppressed into something more that represents the people of the nation who have a history before colonialism, who were once but are are no longer under oppression, and who have a future as people of a nation that is ruling itself. '' '''Related Texts' Marx, Karl. Capital Volume 1, 1867. Edited by Friedrich Engels and translated by Samuel Moore. The Norton '' ''Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Peter Simon, W. W. Norton & Company, 2010, pp. 663-674. Major Criticisms 'References' Simon, Peter, editor. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. “Jean Paul Sartre: Existentialism.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, www.iep.utm.edu/sartre-ex. “A Posteriori.” Merriam-Webster Dictionary. N.p., n.d. Web. 5 Nov. 2016, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/a%20posteriori.